Here I am at six thirty in the morning facing another 9-10 hour day filled with stress. Before me is a huge cup of coffee, the legal stimulant drug that gets me through the day. Along with “energy drinks”.

I go to work where conformity is demanded and individuality suppressed. Out on the floor the disgruntled murmur and anger runs skin deep. The name of the game is selling, pushing product with smiling enthusiasm even if the product has so much fat in it or so much sodium that it should wear a skull and cross bones.

Workers are treated like children and act out in a passive aggressive manner.

The stress of part time work in retail is brutal with its fluctuating hours meaning one can never count on a certain amount of pay when ones check come out.

Workers can be forced to pee in cups or the more modern swab instant drug test that gets so many false positives particularly in older workers who are often on a shopping list of medications.

Coffee is the perfect drug. It helps the focus and boosts both energy and fake enthusiasm. Work turns us into corporate liars and caffeine helps us with the guilt. We learn to project a false sincerity in order to sell and keep our jobs secure.

Insecurity is the life blood of the retail slave. We eat insults and customer condescension with a smile knowing that many doing the condescending are but one more economic down turn, one more round of out sourcing or right sizing by the corporate raiders and junk bond peddlers, from joining us. Welcome to Thomas Friedman’s globalized flat earth. Welcome the race to the bottom when it comes to paying workers.

So lift your cup of coffee high in a toast to the death of the middle class. Welcome to the world of the bottom line.

Welcome to the world created by the “free market” and the class war that created the super rich. Thank the neo-cons and neo-libs who brought us here.

And if you are a straight person of color or a white LGBT/T person welcome to the world where we waste our time on horizontal hostility while those with the money who created this world use us as scapegoats to distract us from who the real oppressors are.

Many years ago, about the time I got my surgery I bought a camera. It was a fixed lens rangefinder Yashica with aperture priority, 35mm. It was the first decent camera I owned that was capable of easy accurate focus and the sort of operation that permitted me to start doing documentary photography.

I was a documentary photographer, photographing the culture of my friends. Yet it was hard for many to take seriously what I was doing.

When a transsexual or transgender person produces art that reflects the reality that they live many of our sisters castigate us for being “professional trannies”.

Many of our biographies even if they have our name as author are actually ghost written. Although not all are and even those ghost written are a telling of our stories.

I have a book case full of biographies ranging from the barely literate to some that are wonderfully written by sisters and brothers who have put the effort into learning the craft of writing.

I was inspired by both Lynn Conway and Andrea James’ web sites when I put up this blog. I try to have it reflect my thinking but I also try to vary the topics as well because there are many things that impact our lives.

I’m bothered by this film “Ticked off…”. But rather than censoring it or putting all this energy into protesting it I would rather see our energy poured into supporting our own and their art.

We actually have sisters who are musical artists. We probably have enough to put on a festival of our own.

We have poets… I think half of us have the souls of poets, filling note books and thinking, “Who would possibly want to hear us read our poetry?”

Who would want to hear our music or see our art. And if we show it and explain the impact of growing up with transsexualism or transgenderism then is it about our art or about what we grew up with?

That is the dilemma of any artist who is not part of the straight white male dominant culture. In effect we are minority artists and our art if it has integrity is the art of our life experiences.

I have heard sisters and some brothers too speak dismissively of art produced by us that shows us or reflects our lives. As though the only way we can be successful is if we are so integrated into the dominant culture our own birth history vanishes.

Rather than just protest I think we need to take a different approach. I remember the Gay Liberation Front picketing “Boys in the Band”, the Daughters of Bilitis , I think, picketed “The Killing of Sister George”. And all the other films that garnered more publicity from the protests and became must see films due to the controversy. It just caused more people to go.

We have a highly praised documentary, “Prodigal Sons” http://prodigalsonsfilm.com/description.html playing the same festival circuit. Perhaps we should spend at least as much effort pointing out the positive as the negative. Holding “Prodigal Sons” up as example of something for us and by us that shows the reality of our lives.

We also need to start putting our money where our mouths are. Buy the CDs of artists like Namoli Brennet and Baby Dee. We could buy the documentaries and write letters to Sundance Channel, Logo, IFC and Current TV thanking them when they put on a positive show. Or even one that amuses us because sometimes the trashy and comedic entertain us by and not the straights simply by invoking those in group jokes.

We could actually buy the books of sisters and brothers. I realize expecting y’all to be supportive of each other instead of trashing each other is asking a lot… But if all we do is trash talk each other why are we surprised when the dominant culture trash talks us?

Instead of just protesting the negative, even though it needs to be done, perhaps we should put the same amount of energy into supporting the positive.

On Wednesday evening we went to a Vegetarian Restaurant, The Cosmic Cafe, in the Oak Lawn/Cedar Springs area of Dallas. Oh yes, we have our own Gay Ghettos here too. The decor is a wonderful melange of every cliche found in hippie guru tripping while seeking out the “wisdom of the East”. In short it was “groovy” and brings a smile to our omnivore faces when ever we opt to eat there.

The food BTW is incredibly delicious and we have yet to order a disappointing meal there.

When we first got to Texas we were sort of appalled to discover the three meat combo that is all too common in BBQ restaurants. My reaction was, “Meat is not a side for meat. Y’all might just want to scarf some veggies with that and French fries don’t count as a veggie.”

I’m not sure of the rest of the world outside of the US, but the corporate selling machine has helped program our eating pattern to such a space where obesity is the given and thin/healthy is the exception.

Now we should read out ingredients as well as the calories per serving as well as what constitutes a serving but many of us are uninsured until 65 since we are either unemployed or under-employed. Not to mention how many of us have jobs that do not provide insurance. This makes staying healthy a requirement.

Organic is important in some product like milk. There are too many growth hormones and antibiotics in the regular milk. With other things the organic is not so important. Look for the little green and white USDA Certified Organic label. The corporations try to trip you up by using “Natural” or “All Natural”, which does not mean the same thing.

For me vegetarian meals are part of an over all pattern and not a way of life because I still like meat in all its various forms. I just prefer to not get into the coronary care loop with stents and by-passes if I can avoid it through diet.

How does this bring us to the Auto Show? I often think that even in a hostile or indifferent society it is possible for each of us to do small things that in turn encourage others to do small things. I’ve watched as cigarette smoking has gone from common to rare. I see solar panels and power generating wind mills at a few houses within several miles of my house. I have farmers and ranchers who were going to turn their farms and ranches into housing developments tell me that organic farming and raising grass fed beef has kept them going.

We have been looking at the Prius for several years now. We aren’t in the market for a new car yet, our paid for Jetta only has 60K on it and is a wonderful car to drive. But it only averages 28 MPG when I drive to and from work .

So the Prius is a given and so are the Volkswagen TDI clean diesel models. Subaru is famous for its LGBT/T friendly advertising. Scions are cute and so is the Kia Soul and the not so LGBT/T friendly Nissan Cube.

But at this Auto Show the car company that most fascinated me was Ford with their brand new Focus Hybrid and their 34-40MPG Fiesta. There is a certain allure to buying an American product as a statement at this particular time. A way of rewarding an American company for getting the message that we want greener cars that get better mileage.

Not to mention the fact that the Fiesta is so fucking cute.

Green is a new song in the repertoire at events like these. There were several side attraction vendors selling light tubes and solar powered attic fans because in spite of the climate change deniers there is a critical mass of people out there looking for small things they can do to live greener and reduce their carbon foot prints.

For me “alternative lifestyle” never had anything to do with having had to deal with transsexualism or even much to do with my lesbianism. For me “alternative lifestyle” was more about what caused me to read beat poetry as well as listen to folk music. It had to do with living consciously rather than consuming conspicuously.

Poverty played a role in my not consuming conspicuously and I like nice things as much as the next person even if the nice things I like are different. It is just that I would rather buy books than cosmetics, a new lens than expensive shoes or boots.

Last night I finished reading Patti Smith’s recent memoir of her friendship with Robert Maplethorpe in the late 1960s, early 1970s, titled Just Kids.

Perhaps it is nostalgia what with looking at photographs of that era and remembering friends who died. But there was a time when we were less obsessed with why we were transsexual and spent more personal conversations about art and artists.

There is a retrospective of the later works of Andy Warhol showing at the Fort Worth Modern through May. Tina and I are going tomorrow as our Valentine’s day celebration.

One of the movies I saw in 1967 that really influenced me was Chelsea Girls. That year the Velvet Underground’s first album provided a darker counterpoint to Sgt. Pepper. I was working at a shit job in a piss factory and like Patti Smith, I too had something inside of me called desire.

I was political and part of a movement that helped end the war in Vietnam and we were all “just kids”.

When I got to San Francisco and started the process of changing sex I was helped by an office that offered support for those changing sex. It was started by people who had their “Stonewall” three years before New York City’s. And they too were just kids.

I was best friends with a sister named Leslie. We went to old movies together and dug the crowd that hung out at Andy Warhol’s Factory, perhaps because he actually used queens in films directed by Paul Morrissey. Candy Darling tragically dying young of cancer.

We spoke of the creating our lives as art projects, “I am an artist and my life is my art.” Mostly we were escaping, running from as much as running towards.

Rock and roll with words that mattered from Dylan to Patti Smith, whose opening lines to her first recording “Hey Joe”, the A-side of “Piss Factory” were, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”

We lost so many people along the way. Too many to drugs and way too many to AIDS. Andy Warhol died in 1987, over 20 years ago. Robert Maplethorpe died about the same time.

And somewhere along the line we stopped caring so much about art as something that really matters and be came obsessed with why we are this way.

As though the existential answer of, “I am this way because this is the way I am” is insufficient response to bigotry and psychiatric abuse.

This Blog is nearly one year old. It has been through some changes. Lots of people who came here at first are now denouncing me on their own blogs and over on TS-SI.

They are saying I betrayed them because I don’t embrace “classic transsexual” or HBS. People are upset because while I think transsexualism is a form of intersex I haven’t believed Ayn Randian, individualist claims of special exemption due to “I’m not really like other transsexuals, I’m really intersex”” since Agnes story turned out to be a manufactured tale that got her SRS in the late 1950s.

I have been attacked as a traitor because people expected WBT to expend a lot of energy attacking transgender people and I refuse to. Transsexualism and transgenderism are different but when it come to oppression we are all “trannie queer gender trash”.

A lot of the expectations of my taking some sort of militantly anti-transgender stance and throwing the same shit at transgender folks as the Christo-Fascist right comes from where I was at for a short while about 9-10 years back when I was getting sober and in the aftermath of 9/11 and not reflective of a lifetime of left wing activism on my part.

I moved back to the left thanks to reading people like the late Howard Zinn and from revulsion towards the hate that was being spewed by the “classic transsexual” faction. Tina also played a major role in telling me how unbecoming my involvement in the near Fascism of the conservatives was and in reminding me of my basic working class New Deal Democratic roots.

When I am asked why I believe certain things and why I am a militant lefty, an anarchist, I joke and say, “It’s all Pete Seeger’s fault.” But I could as easily blame it on Joe Hill or Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck.

A couple of years ago Tina and I watched the move Grapes of Wrath, and I recalled Tom Joad’s soliloquy.

Now Woody Guthrie saw the movie and wrote the following song. After hearing it Steinbeck said, “Woody managed to tell the story that took me some 400 pages in about 6 minutes.

Some times on a lot of matters I think this might be a better world if instead of asking “What would John Galt do?” we asked “What would Tom Joad do?”

by
Andrea Brown

In our present society which is dominated by a set of financial cults masquerading as spiritual cults which worship a social construct known as man, transsexualism has no place for the following reasons. We do not pay large amounts of wealth to these cults or give them large amounts of influence therefore we are attacked for the following reasons.

Women born transsexual people are getting rid of penises, which the religiously dogmatic, psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, fanatics and transgender all worship as the supreme organ. In the eyes of the religious cults, psychiatrists and other deranged sociopath’s, which is seen as a grave sin. They worship the penis as the giver of live. They have not figured out it is just an organ that the body can live without and in fact is the same tissue as the vagina, just differently arranged in the womb.

Sex reassignment surgery just rearranges the penis tissue into vagina for transsexual people, although not as well as what would occur in the womb. The organs that life comes from are the womb, ovaries, vagina and testes with some minor assistance from the penis. The womb is the safe place for life and the vagina is the releaser of life into the greater world, from the safety of the womb. The womb is the protector of life.

Present day male dominance comes from pre-christian Roman male supremacy. They would never allow a female emperor or a woman to hold any position of power. When a roman emperor Elagabalus who reigned from 218AD to 222AD ordered his surgeons to change him from male to female, the Praetorian Guard murdered him as an affront to Rome. Roman emperors were notorious for there excess’s, but wanting a vagina was to much for the Roman’s, due to there hatred of women, but everything else, such as Trajans genocide in Dacia (Romania) was completely acceptable and celebrated as a great event.

Trajan’s column is seen as a cultural exhibit. It celebrates the deaths and enslavement of millions as well as the destruction of an entire language and culture, previously known as Dacia, which was a comparable civilization with the Hellenistic Greeks.

The coliseum may have had as many people die in the arena as in Auschwitz. How can such a place of evil were people died for the amusement of mobs be seen as a cultural icon?

The Roman’s had a very anti-female attitude to the point that if a woman was raped, the rapist was only charged with an affront to her husband. A woman was the property of her father until marriage, upon which she became the property of her husband. If her husband died her oldest son or male relative became in effect her owner. Basically in plain language a woman was subhuman and merely property in Roman eyes at the same level as a horse or cart.

Strangely today a lot of people keep trying to promote Rome as some sort of basis of civilization. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini both tried to emulate the Roman Empire, although Hitler was closest due to his genocide of entire groups in society, just like the Roman’s. They exterminated the Dacians (Romanians). They also killed one third of the French, wiping out their language and culture, then replacing it at the point of the sword with Latin, which evolved into modern French over the last 2000 years. The ancient Gaul’s, spoke a mixture of Basque in the south-west, Celtic in the central part east and west, Hellenistic at the mouth of the Rhone and Germanic languages in the north of France as did the Belgae. The roman’s in their genocidal rampage, which stripped every piece of gold, destroyed all of this European cultural heritage and cultural richness, and silver it could from every country.

It is good to see the modern day European Union funding so many language and cultural issues, groups and events all over Europe, in some cases even leading to strengthening of local culture.

All the Romanesque languages are descended from Latin, which was imposed in those countries at the point of a sword by the Roman army. Countries such as Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, north Italy, Bulgaria and Romania, all of who had their language and cultures wiped out and replaced by Latin and roman woman hating. Those countries lost their languages and their cultures. The loss to society is incalculable.

The southern Germans got it from the Romans from 15BC to 13BC, although they got even in the battle of Teutoburg in 9AD, the 2000th anniversary of which was this year. That battle checked the Roman Empire, slowing the spread of roman woman hating, which in turn slowed down the spread of Christianity to Northern Europe until 1000 to 1300. Without that, the reformation may not have taken place, as older ideas still existed in some places in common memory and story telling in parts. Arminius (Herman the German) may have given all of us our present freedom, without even realizing it. If Arminius had not checked the Roman Empire, Scandinavia, Scotland and Eastern Europe would have fallen soon afterwards, leaving the Romans to only face the Partheons/Persians on there eastern side, instead of always defending there northern borders. That would have condemned the European world to permanent decay, eventually leading to a religious take over, that would have been permanent inquisition.

A lot of Christian historians still do not even mention the battle of Teutoburg, yet it was one of the most, if not the most decisive battle’s in history. The site of the battle has been found and it appears that the roman tale of ambush may have been exaggerated. The latest research indicates it may have been a straight out battle. Military tacticians study that battle, due to its sheer decisiveness and the fact that the Germans literally had been in the Stone Age 20 years before, yet completely and utterly annihilated the most modern roman army of the time. No commander of an army, before or since has achieved such a victory.

The worst act by the Roman’s may have been the destruction of the Hellenistic civilization. Leaving aside the horrific toll in human lives, the Antikythera mechanism gives a good idea of what the roman’s really did. They destroyed technological advances, setting us back farther than anyone realized, until the Antikythera Mechanism was studied. Now a horrible truth is starting to dawn on people studying the Hellenistic society and Rhodes in particular. The roman’s were the destroyers of technological development and scientific thought, all of which the roman’s considered unmanly, therefore beneath them and to destroyed.

I was once tried to build a replica of the Antikythera mechanism as I have a casual interest in older technology. It is the only ancient creation I had to give up on in the early stages. When 3D printers become available in the next few years, I will print one from the lithographs that have been taken, as it is almost or possibly as complicated as Charles Babbage’s machines. I asked an engineer for advice on building it. He initially laughed, making jokes about building it in an hour, saw the nature publication on the antikythera mechanism, said it is impossible, he sat dumb struck, when he realized it was a real design from the 2nd century BC. He couldn’t build it either and passed the links to it around his engineer friends, who were all in disbelief. If it had not been published in the scientific journal Nature, neither they or myself would have believed it was real and would have dismissed it as something from a new age nut job.

The Catholic Church took over from the roman emperors after Attila the Hun was bought of in 452 when Pope Leo 1 brought the richest man in Rome to meet Attila. The spin the Catholic Church put on it was that the social construct which the Catholic Church uses as a societal control mechanism called God had defeated Attila the Hun. By bringing ex-consul Avienus, the richest man in Rome and Trygetius, a diplomat. Leo had the perfect team to negotiate with Attila the Hun on behalf of Valentinian. Avienus had the gold to bribe Attila and in effect would have meant no gold left in Rome, so pointless destroying from Attila’s point of view. Trygetius was a great diplomat, who would have smoothed over all negotiations. Leo was completely fearless. He had an ego as big as any megalomaniac in history, believing he was directly protected by the protection of the holy trinity. Leo was perfect to bring as he would have been able to play on Attila’s fears, as Attila was superstitious.

In effect that meant Attila had all the gold, so there was no point in invading Rome. Leo in classic Catholic Church spin-doctor mode, used this event to add even more control over the dying remains of the Roman Empire from the Emperor. Leo extracted a letter from Emperor Valentinian formally recognizing Leo as leader of all the catholic Church as he was holder of the keys of St. Peters in 445 AD, the same year that Attila took over control of the Huns from his uncle Rugila. Leo then went on to declare in 452 AD that a miracle occurred upon meeting Attila and that the Catholic Church had driven back the Huns with the help of God, when in fact it was a massive gold bribe.

That event led to a deranged belief taking hold in the Roman Empire, that the Catholic Church could save them from Earthly dangers. A belief, which is ingrained into almost a billion people today, worldwide.

The roman empire was then a white hot crucible in which there was a mindset of slaughter in the Coliseum for amusement, slavery, extermination of perceived enemies, anti-science, anti-technology, anti-women, anti-disabled, male supremacy at all costs, destruction of all other cultures and replacement of other languages with Latin. All this was occurring in an empire in its death throws, at its most dangerous time.

In the all-consuming firestorm, that was the Roman Empire at the time. Catholicism violently defeated other forms of Christianity such as Arianism. The birth of Christianity at the time in the Roman Empire was as violent as the birth of Islam, shortly afterwards.

The attacks on women were particularly violent. A good example of the violence towards women is Hypatia of Alexandria.

Hypatia of Alexandria was a tall, very strong-minded woman, who rode a chariot, who taught the following statements to her students of mathematics, engineering and astronomy.

“All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final”.

“Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all”.

“To teach superstitions as truth, is a most terrible thing”.

The fact that she was tall, glamorous, would not be subservient to men, outspoken against religious dogma, rode around in a chariot and was a mathematician would have really pissed of the Christians at the time as they were anti-science, enforcers of religious dogma and only saw woman as existing to give birth to more men and to serve men as slaves.

In 412 AD a group of catholic monks known as the “Parabalani” led by Saint Cyril, dragged her from her chariot and into a church. There Cyril and his followers sliced her to pieces with oyster shells and when in her last breath, burnt her. Saint Cyril was made a saint for this act and he declared his followers in the Parabalani to be saints for this Christian act of butchering an innocent woman.

The term Parabalani means student, as does the term Taliban. Now you know where the Taliban get their inspiration.

Cyril is still revered as a saint. For those of you who wonder what it takes to become a saint, the Vatican is in the middle of creating another saint. His name is Cardinal Stepianic or ‘beloved’ as nazi apologists now refer him to. According to the former Yugoslavian government when they tried him in 1946 for war crimes, he and his Dominican monks followers were responsible for the deaths of up to 750,000 Jews, Serbian orthodox, gypsies and others in the area covering modern Croatia and Bosnia. His followers had a thing for slitting the throats of young children. Pope John Paul 2 started the process of making that nazi war criminal a saint. Joe Ratzinger, now known as Pope Benedict who wears dresses and red patent shoes, formerly of the Hitler Youth, is now finalizing the process of making a nazi war criminal a saint.

The allies choose not to try Stepianic at Nurnberg, as they did not want to embarrass the Vatican, instead having Tito take on the task. Tito had to deal with the Catholic Church setting up martyr committee’s in every country, forming campaigns stating that Stepianic was a prisoner of conscience, when in fact he was a genocidal murderer. He should have been hanged at Nurnberg along with the rest of the nazi’s. He was seen as a good Dominican as was Miroslav Filipović who was hanged in his friar’s robes.
Miroslav Filipović was a true Dominican friar, upholding its highest ethics. He slit the throats of young girls stating he and his followers were doing gods work. In doing so, he has proven there has been no change since Saint Cyril in how the Catholic Church operates.

The Ustaše were against industrialization and democracy, just like the modern day Catholic Church and the earlier Roman Empire, which they inherited. The basic principles of the movement were laid out by Pavelić in his 1929 pamphlet “Principles of the Ustaše Movement”.

Over the next few centuries the cult of ultra male dominance slowly spread all over Europe. Mostly it was by the sword, not by consensual belief as most think.

The crusades were one example of how it spread. Most think the crusades only happened in the Middle East. There was a crusade to destroy the Saxon religion in Germany and Netherlands. Part of this was forced conversion to christianity and then execution. They then tried to crusade against Denmark but got beaten back. The crusade against the Slavs to christianise them was particularly violent.

When the Normans entered Ireland, most do not realise that the Normans considered all christians there to be heretic. The Pope at the time said that the Irish were heretic, due to some limited freedom of ideas.

After each crusade women had less rights and freedom of movement.

Now Rome is on a new crusade. The present Pope is calling for no rights for gays and transsexuals.

Too often those espousing the identity politics of “Transgender as Umbrella”, in order to enlarge their numbers from being a small minority group within world of L/G communities, set such broad factors for inclusion in the transgender label that it appears that only a small minority of people aren’t transgender.

This of course erases transsexuals to the point where GLAAD’s style book and folks like Autumn Sandeen appear to think that it is appropriate to change transsexual to transgender when ever the word appears in print. The same goes for pre-op, post-op and sex change operation which enter the Orwell New Speak Morphing Machine and emerge as the nicely euphemistic and neutered “transition”.

Since when did “transsexual” acquire the same sort of stigma as a word like “nigger” that requires its being euphemized?

For me transsexual means changing sex or physical sex characteristics. Not to mention living 24/7/365 in a manner consistent with the sex you are becoming.

At its core transsexualism is about the deep seated need to change sex from that assigned at birth. Arguments as to why change with the seasons and are almost matters of faith. Reasons are all legitimate to those doing the changing. No matter the strength of evidence as to a physical nature there is no argument that will ever convince the bigots.

People with transsexualism have struggled to put words to what they feel ever since we started putting pen to paper and trying to relate our stories in the 1950s (I am currently rereading Roberta Cowell’s autobiography) The language lacks the words to relate what we feel inside and so we are forced to use metaphors.

At its core transsexualism is about having an operation to change one’s assigned at birth sex, that is why it is sex reassignment surgery.

Transsexualism has several common narratives. Those narratives distinguish us from others who appear similar but who do not have the same desperate drive to actually have an operation to change their sex.

To placate the bigots we have desexed transsexualism to the point where it seems that wanting to be able to have sex as female or male bodied people (depending on the direction of change) no longer plays a part in our wanting SRS.

We have desexed transsexualism under the rubric of transgender to the point where wanting our bodies to look consistent with our gender of presentation when we are naked is looked upon as elitist rather than consistent with our changing sex to have our bodies match our core sex identity.

I view gender as suspect. Over thousands of years gender roles have been used to keep women as second class humans. Substituting gender for sex reifies gender roles that keep women as second class humans deemed inferior to men.

What is gender identity if gender itself is an abstract construct that shifts over time and location? Gender identity makes sense in the claims of transgender people as they are claiming that acting the role makes them real. Indeed they denounce the “body essentialism” of those of us who point out that women are adult females and that men are adult males irrespective of their presentation.

But I am a woman born transsexual and not a woman born transgender so I do not have to stake claim to womanhood based on my ability to adhere to an abstract gender role that I claim such an intensity of identity to, that it allows me to deny my actual body.

My femaleness in all its mix of masculine and feminine hippie anarchist feminist elements is confirmed every time I squat to pee, shower, make love or masturbate.

Now there are some who feel the need to add “Classic” to their transsexual. I generally find these people to be conservative and heterosexist if not down right homophobic. It especially sends them into a tizzy when two sisters form a lesbian bond. It also seems as though “classic transsexual” is the latest incarnation of BBLZ etc’s AGP/AP model.

I am vaguely amused when lesbian sisters who initially embraced the term discover that it doesn’t mean those of us who have had SRS . That it isn’t a substitute for post-op the way WBT was initially envisioned and instead it requires the embrace of a heterosexist stance that says post-SRS women who are lesbian should work for the protection of heterosexual marriage for post-SRS women. While lesbian sisters are expected to settle for civil unions for themselves because same sex marriage would denigrate the heterosexual marriages entered into by “classic transsexuals” At the same time “classic transsexuals” refuse to recognize the validity of lesbian relationships within the post-op transsexual community.

You know there was a time when those of us who had sex change operations were rare, indeed. When I got mine there were maybe a few thousand people who had the same surgery I had. But now there are hundreds of thousands of us and the only thing that unites us is having had sex reassignment surgery.

Now I’ve know post-ops who have been perfectly flawless in every way and others who can’t live outside the ghetto. But the vast majority of them who didn’t flat out lie and deceive the screeners had elements of that basic set of early established narratives as part of their life experiences and that makes all of them “classic transsexuals” in my book, which means I can dispense with the classic modifier.

If you want to say transsexuals who actually get sex change surgery then say it. Don’t beat around around the bush. When you start using “classic transsexual” in any other context than post-op then you are as much as saying there are many different kinds of transsexuals. With many comes validation of the claims of transgender people to being “non-op transsexuals”.

I am also not a fan of HBS. I liked Dr. Benjamin. He was nice in an old school liberal, paternalistic sort of way but like most of those who study us he leaped to many many erroneous conclusions. But even more so syndrome isn’t much of an improvement on disorder if any. It is as though we are making Dr. Benjamin into some sort of definer of us rather than a facilitator who learned from what we told him.

We existed in ancient times and in every culture. I perfer the term transsexual.

Now the argument can be made that it is tainted by association with sex workers. Yet long before the emergence of IFGE, NTAC and other Transactivist groups, sex work was often the only means of survival we had. It still is for way too many people.

By the same token isn’t the transgender argument for the use of transgender instead of transsexual based upon transsexual being the term of choice for so many trans* sex workers?

To me WBT, transsexual, post-op, woman of a transsexual history, classic transsexual all pretty much mean the same thing. They all mean that the person to whom those various terms are applied had an operation that changed their genital from those of one sex to another. All the other stuff is just window dressing that tries to hide the fact that having sex reassignment surgery is what defines us as transsexual.

Not having it and talking about gender as though it is more than clothing and mannerisms is a transgender thing, not transsexual. We don’t transition, we get sex change operations hence the term transsexual.